After a long career at Barron's, I joined Forbes as San Francisco bureau chief in December 2010. I've been writing about technology and investing for more than 25 years. With the Tech Trade, I've picked up where I left off when I was writing the Tech Trader Daily blog at Barrons.com. When I'm not working, you can find me riding my road bike around the Bay Area hills, managing my fantasy baseball team, rooting for my beloved Phillies and Eagles and hanging out in the Valley with my family. You can follow me on Facebook, on Twitter (@savitz), and on Google+.

The FBI's Steve Jobs File: Computing 'Genius,' Lousy GPA

Editor’s note: Connie Guglielmo this week joins Forbes as a reporter in our San Francisco bureau. She previously spent a long stretch covering the Valley and the tech business for Bloomberg, where she broke many scoops about Apple and other topics. She’ll be doing more of the same for us. Connie will have her own blog up and running shortly; meanwhile, here’s her take on today’s release of the FBI file on Steve Jobs.

A page from the FBI's Steve Jobs dossier.

Steve Jobs was strong willed and stubborn, hardworking, driven, extremely health-conscious, deceptive, complex, ambitious, creative, willing to distort the truth at times to get his way, an excellent business negotiator and recruiter of talent, good at mediating, demanding, straightforward, forthright, narcissistic — “a visionary and charismatic individual who at the same time was shallow and callous to people in his personal relationships.”

He was also a “genius in the area of computers” even though he was “not an engineer in the real sense.”

Not exactly new news.

Still, the 191-page background investigation put together by the FBI in 1991 when Jobs, then CEO of NeXT Inc., was being considered for a position on President George H. Bush’s Export Council is interesting reading if only for the odd tidbits, like his Social Security number, his high school grade point average (2.65 out of 4.0), his height (6 feet tall), and his only membership being to the New York Athletic Club, which he said he had never been in.

There’s also his self-described employment record, which starts with a 15-month stint at Atari Inc. in 1974. When asked if he left a job for any reason, he checks Option 5 on the “Questionnaire for Sensitive Positions” to describe his inglorious exit from Apple in 1985: “Left a job for other reasons, under unfavorable circumstances.”

Released earlier Thursday, the report, which also includes details of a 1985 investigation into a bomb threat against Apple, offers up praise — and criticism — of Jobs from more than 30 friends, former employers, co-workers, business peers and neighbors, in the dry, mundane prose you would expect from the FBI. One former Apple colleague’s interview is summed up in part with this: “The Appointee always appeared to live within his means and associated with an eclectic group of people, most of whom are famous.”

You’ll also find the summary of their interview with Jobs, which apparently took three weeks to set up. Jobs’ secretary is reported as telling the FBI he could not even see them “for one hour” before then.

There are tributes aplenty to his intelligence and creativity from colleagues and other business leaders at Apple, Adobe, Sun, General Magic and NeXT, among others. There’s concern about his high school and college drug use and a lot of references to the out-of-wedlock daughter that he initially refused to support. There’s a search for his birth certificate, which was a little tricky to get since Jobs was adopted.

There’s also the former Apple employee who was bitter about not getting stock options from Jobs. The unhappy ex-Apple staffer describe Jobs, who died in October, as someone “who will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals” and who “possesses integrity as long as he gets his way.”

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.